This book shows how certain crucial concepts in Kant's aesthetics and practical philosophy fit together and deepen our understanding of his thought.

The first in-depth treatment of the major theories of the sublime from Longinus to Kant.

In The Sublime in Modern Philosophy: Aesthetics, Ethics, and Nature, Emily Brady takes a fresh look at the sublime and shows why it endures as a meaningful concept in contemporary philosophy. In a reassessment of historical approaches, the first part of the book identifies the scope and value of the sublime in eighteenth-century philosophy (with a focus on Kant), nineteenth-century philosophy and Romanticism, and early wilderness aesthetics. The second part examines the sublime's contemporary significance through its relationship to the arts; its position with respect to other aesthetic categories involving mixed or negative emotions, such as tragedy; and its place in environmental aesthetics and ethics. Far from being an outmoded concept, Brady argues that the sublime is a distinctive aesthetic category which reveals an important, if sometimes challenging, aesthetic-moral relationship with the natural world.

In Sublime Failures, David Martyn argues that a return to Kant's latent "Sadianism" helps to confront the unresolved question of agency -- or how to formulate an ethic after the deconstruction of the subject -- in cultural studies theory. Acknowledging allegations of Kant's "empty formalism" and even of his proximity to a certain Sadianism, Martyn argues that Kant's ethics are valid not despite but because of their similarity to those of Sade. In close readings that address the historical and material conditions of the composition of their work, Martyn argues that the efforts of Kant and Sade to totalize systems -- of ethics, philosophy, pleasures, crimes -- must fail, but that the failure leads to important insights about ethics. The book offers philosophical and rhetorical analyses of the two authors' major works, and focuses on two related thematic fields: the economy of the gift and the materiality of writing. Stories of giving and thievery in Sade are read in tandem with Kant's elaborations about what is and is not "given" to us in the phenomenal world, and Kant's digressions on the challenges of writing a critique of pure reason are correlated with Sade's depictions of the crime of writing. A reinterpretation of the Kantian sublime then allows for an alignment of these two paradigms by showing how writing and the "gift" invalidate the teleological premises of traditional ethics. The book concludes with a critique of Lacan's essay, "Kant with Sade, " which provides an occasion to assess questions of gender, "race, " and cultural alterity.

In recent years Kant's aesthetic theory has been the subject of a widespread revival of interest amongst English-speaking philosophers. This revival, however, has not so far encompassed Kant's aesthetic of the sublime. This neglect is unfortunate because, amongst Continental philosophers, the Kantian sublime is currently receiving widespread discussion in debates about the nature of postmodernism. Paul Crowther thus breaks new ground by providing what is probably the first monograph in any language to be devoted exclusively to Kant's theory of the sublime.

When originally published in 1960, this was the first complete English translation since 1799 of Kant's early work on aesthetics. More literary than philosophical, Observations shows Kant as a man of feeling rather than the dry thinker he often seemed to readers of the three Critiques.

A book considering Kant's account of the overpowering feeling of the sublime, and the moral law within, which exercised an extraordinary influence on the movements of Romanticism, Hegelian phenomenology, and Continental Philosophy.